Quintura

» see quintura.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

You typed a query and Quintura gave you two things. Underneath was the ordinary list of blue links. Above it was an interactive cloud of words the engine thought were related, and if you moved the pointer onto one of those words the cloud redrew itself around it and the links below changed to match. The logo carried the whole pitch in three words: see and find.

This arrived in the middle of my university years in Turkey, when everybody technical had the habit of trying whatever search engine somebody had blogged about that week. Quintura was one of those. The cloud really was pleasant for about four queries. Then you went back to Google, because Google had the answer and Quintura had a diagram of the neighborhood the answer lived in.

The company was Quintura Inc., registered in Alexandria, Virginia, with its engineering in Moscow, run by co-founder and CEO Yakov Sadchikov. Mangrove Capital of Luxembourg led a seed round in November 2006 and OpenView Venture Partners of Boston came in alongside, with several million more arriving in June 2007. TechCrunch described that first round as the first Western venture investment into a Russian internet company.

~ the cloud ~

Visual search was a small genre with one shared flaw. KartOO drew maps of its results and Quintura drew clouds, and both were better to look at than to use. The visualization helped when you did not know what you were looking for, and that turns out to be a small fraction of the times anybody opens a search box. When you did know, the cloud was a layer standing between you and the links.

There was a spinoff that made more sense than the main product. Quintura Kids, at quinturakids.com, ran the same cloud over a filtered index, and PC World wrote it up as a way of keeping children out of the parts of the web you did not want them in. A word cloud is a good interface for a seven-year-old who cannot spell the query yet.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a frozen page that kept answering ~

The homepage dates its own death twice over. Every JavaScript file it loads carries the build stamp 20100826 in its query string, and the copyright notice underneath stops at 2010. After August 2010 nothing on that page changed again.

It kept serving anyway. The Internet Archive has the same frozen page coming back month after month for nearly three more years, with the search box still there and the little cloud still rendering. The last capture that returns the page is from 24 May 2013.

From 25 May 2013 the server answers with a 302 to quinturakids.com, and it keeps answering that way through the end of 2013. The search engine's final act was to point at its own children's version. The kids site then served until 7 April 2015 and stopped.

~ what is on the domain now ~

quintura.com still returns 200. It is the 2010 markup, logo and all, with a long block of Turkish hotel names bolted onto the bottom of it, Antalya and Fethiye resorts linked out to booking pages. There is a page at oldversion.php filled with machine-written prose about Quintura's place in the history of search, admiring a product that the same domain is currently using as a doormat. quinturakids.com is now a French parenting magazine.

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